Technical Writing: What It Is and How to Build a Career Around It

Most companies hire quite often tech translation services yet heavily rely on engineers for tech writing skills: some of us get to write a lot of technical documentation or even technical project proposals. As tech professionals we all recognize the importance of communication or at times the lack of it, yet we seldom think of this as a career.

Together with Tekom Europe we want to bring to your attention the details of a niche career: technical writing, and we want to explore together with our speakers some of the facets of this career:

• How does someone decide to be a tech writer?
• Day-to-day job: how do a day and a month of work look like?
• Advice for someone who would start this career: what opportunities might be in the area?
• Where does technical writing fit "in the bigger picture" of technical engineering? Where does Requirements Engineering fit in the work process and how all this is managed?

Tekom Europe is the largest professional association for technical communication in Europe. They are committed to increasing the importance of technical communication and the development of the profession.

We’ll talk about all these and we'll be happy to take your questions about it. Join us for this interesting discussion!

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Agenda:
18:30 - Welcome and intro to the topic
18:50 - Break-out rooms
19:00 - A day in the life of a Technical Writing professional (Melania Duma - SDL & Sonia Pavlenko - ASCOM)
19:30 - Where does Technical Writing fit in the broader picture (Monica Chis - Freelance IT Consultant & Trainer)
19:50 - Q&A session
20:05 - Share an idea with the community in 1 minute! x 5
20:10 - Closing the meetup

• Melania Duma is a Technical Writer at SDL Limited, Linguist and Cambridge Examiner. She is interested in helping development teams get their message across users and stakeholders in a clear, simplified manner. For the past 8 years, she has been working with CMS systems, XML editors, DITA. She holds the Tekom Expert Technical Writing certificate.

• Sonia Pavlenko is also a Technical Writer, teacher and Cambridge Examiner. She is interested in continuously developing her skills & knowledge in the field of technical writing and learning how to make best use of CMS systems.

• Monica is a freelancer Software IT Consultant and Trainer. She has been working in various roles in different areas: IT industry, Research, and University for more than 23 years. Her experience involves all aspects of a project, product, and software development life cycles. She is a customer-oriented person and she really believes that it is possible to create simple processes for delivering Quality Software Products with agile methodology. She is also a trainer for “SPOR – Şcoala pentru oameni responsabili” offering training for Quality Assurance in Software Projects.